Best practices for learning Blender
You may wish to check out the Blender wiki. For instance, it has a series of articles on starting to use Blender for the first time, and it has many articles for specific topics.

Some tutorial websites you may find useful include:


BlenderCookie and their Blender Basics tutorial series
BlenderGuru, offering a tutorials of varying difficulty for specific tasks with general lessons
BlenderDiplom, another similar website


You can also ask for critiques on the BlenderArtists forum.

I would recommend checking the regular contests on websites like BlenderGuru and BlenderCookie. Even if you don't feel qualified to enter, give it your best shot &ndash; you may learn something along the way.